INTERRELATIONS OP SECRETIONS 45 



ever, especially in the fields of surgery. The medical 

 profession has to be one step ahead of the laity or it is 

 very likely to condemn the subject in question ; but in 

 the course of time, practical scientists insist on the 

 reintroduction of anything really useful and scientific 

 which will benefit mankind. 



That the internal secretions and their possibilities 

 are now being widely recognized is patent even to the 

 prejudiced, and this in spite of untoward publicity in 

 the press. One of the most prominent of the world's 

 medical weeklies has for the past few months been in- 

 cluding in its leading papers pithy articles on the sub- 

 ject (1). 



One cannot go very far into the study of the internal 

 secretions without being struck with the fact that there 

 is a possibility of the endocrine glands having some 

 close relation to one another. Physiology has demon- 

 strated beyond a doubt that in the functioning of the 

 digestive secretions certain "hormones" are necessary 

 to maintain the balance and provide certain stimuli to 

 the glands producing these secretions to maintain qual- 

 ity and quantity at normal (2) . The fact that a hor- 

 mone may augment a mental stimulus is more or less 

 simulated in the fact that a man's well-being depends 

 as much upon the endocrine balance as upon mental 

 stimuli that have no particular relation to endocrine 

 function. The mental stimulation in both cases is more 

 or less fleeting while the hormones and internal secre- 

 tions have to "carry on." It is a coincidence that Star- 

 ling should have given such a stimulus to our present- 

 day conception of endocrinology and to have coined the 

 term "hormone" in relation to the digestive stimula- 

 tion (3). 



Although the relationship of certain endocrine 

 glands with one another has been demonstrated 

 these many years, it is only in the last decade that the 



